Swing Season

Not talking about swings of the bat, because it certainly isn’t that for the Phillies. “Swing” meaning pivotal. I’ve written about this already, but now the national media has caught on. No doubt from this very blog. Fox Sports has an article on the Phillies and how this year could be the year they cast off some of their veterans: Halladay, Lee, Michael Young, and Utley. Ruben is quoted in the article as saying the Phillies could be “very young” next year as they have a decent crop of prospects at AA and AAA.

When asked about payroll, Amaro said it would probably be about the same regardless of turnover he said: “I would think so. How many people are in the ballpark means a lot to us. Attendance is a larger factor of our revenue than for other clubs because of our marketplace.” What he means by that, I’m not really sure. What we do know is that the Phillies are in line for quite a big payday when they negotiate a new deal with Comcast in a season or two. That far outweighs the attendance factor and could keep them afloat should they start a youth movement and their attendance goes down.

The author then raises the possibility that the Phillies could pull what he calls “Red Sox reboot” and trade some of their veterans to clear payroll and then sign some free agents to combine that with new, young players. I doubt that would happen because the Red Sox got lucky that the Dodgers had new ownership seemingly without a care regarding spending (like the U.S. government) and were out to prove something. The Dodgers took on some bad contracts in that deal. I would be surprised if the Phillies could do that.

The author also suggests it would highly unlikely Rollins or Papelbon would be traded due to their contracts, which is true. But I think it is more unlikely Howard could be traded for that reason, plus his performance thus far.

So the Phillies lost another one today, thanks to their bullpen, their supposed strength coming into this season. Didn’t I just post about how they had been better? Oops. If this continues, we could see a totally different team next year from the top down. That might not necessarily be a bad thing.